


Seers, Prophets, and Summoners

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Backstory, Gen, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-21
Updated: 2014-03-21
Packaged: 2018-01-16 11:20:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1345582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ok. I have no idea what to say or do about this. I've enjoyed the wingfics I've read, but knew i wouldn't do them quite the same way. So I thought I'd play around with the idea. Ended up with this thing that feels, to me, a bit like the start of an adventure novel set in a very Diana Wynne Jones sort of world. Chrestomanci-ish, but not Chrestomanci at all. Chrestomanci-meets-James-Bond?</p><p>This chapter, which is the first and maybe the last, is Mycroft and Sherlock as kids, and is definitely Mycroft-centric. Wings. Halos. Bewildered vicar. </p><p>A number of shamanic traditions only give practitioners talents/access to the supernatural after they've suffered illness, injury, or similar mayhem that forces them into a liminal state. This AU draws on that tradition....</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Seeing Stars and Birdies.

When Mycroft was six he fell from the fat pony he was learning to ride into a stony ditch and cracked his skull. Not a killing injury, but a dangerous one in spite of that, especially as the young lad hired to ride along as groom panicked and fled, terrified he’d be blamed for murder.

Not the brightest of lads, it had to be noted, but heartfelt in his terror.

As a result Mycroft spent the night in a ditch unconscious and concussed and was found in the morning by a stableman who’d been out all night tracking the likely paths the boys had ridden on. By then he was “colder than ice in January,” in the words of the stable manager, and “right off his head, poor lad.” It was six days before he was fully aware again.

On the seventh day the vicar came up to the old Tudor dower house the Holmeses used in preference to the grand house on the hill. Within an hour he confirmed it—Mycroft was a Seer, his world now a spangled wonderland of haloes and wings and glories and ombres.

“What does it mean?” Mycroft asked, frustrated.

“It means you can see significators,” the vicar said.

Mycroft, no dummy, asked with more frustration, “Yes, but what does that _mean_? Mummy’s got a halo. Does that mean she’s an angel?”

The vicar made a face—as well he might. Mummy Holmes challenged even his liberal notions of angelic nature. “It’s not that simple.”

Mycroft frowned. “Dragon wings don’t mean you’re a devil?”

“As I understand it, no. I have dragon wings?” It was hard for the vicar to keep his mind on business, having just been told that enchanting fact. “Real dragon wings?”

“Well, they can’t be that real or you’d be poking holes in the sitting room wall,” Mycroft said, a bit tartly. He was finally old enough to have begun the long revelation that not all adults were either smart or wise. “But they’re quite a lovely greeny-gold, with spines all picked out in metal. Very pretty.”

The vicar’s eyes grew wide. “Greeny-gold with metal spines!” He couldn’t help a delighted grin growing on his face. “Do they move?”

“Yes—right now they’re practically wide as they can get, and quivering.” Mycroft himself was curious. “See if thinking about pulling them in tight changes anything, would you?”

The vicar, telling himself it was all in the interests of science, closed his eyes and imagined greeny-gold wings drawing in, folding down, tucking tightly against his spine. “Any change?”

“Interesting,” Mycroft said. “All nice and tight, yes. Thank you.” He cocked his head. “And you’re sure it’s not simple? Dragon wings bad, bat wings worse, pigeon wings for cherubs, halos for angels and saints, shadows for demons, and so on?”

“No. I’m told that a Seer saw Our Savior Himself all wrapped in shadow pierced with a glory, and his wings were as dragon wings,” the vicar said. “And Judas apparently had the prettiest white eagle’s wings anyone ever saw.”

“Really?” Mycroft was at six already quite dubious about quite a lot of things.

The vicar shrugged and sighed. “That one’s merely ecclesiastical tradition. No scripture and no testimony earlier than the tenth century, I’m afraid. The preponderance of the evidence suggests no one with Seer’s talents witnessed Our Savior or any of the Twelve and reported on it within the tradition. It’s not all that odd. Seer’s talents are rare enough. You’re one in thousands in having the ability.” He smiled, and his wings snapped out and back. “Did they just do anything?”

“Opened and shut.”

The vicar gave him a wistful look, and sighed. “Lucky boy. The things you’ll see! And not all of them as pointless as wings and halos, if I understand correctly.”

Mycroft was never to know what he’d have seen as a simple Seer, though. Or not as a Seer alone. At the age of fifteen he nearly drowned saving Sherlock from a similar fate. The younger boy had waded out too far and been knocked down by a breaker. He’d been tumbled under, and then dragged not forward but back by an eddy. Mycroft went crashing after him. The eddy, however, was a complex little thing—a drag-current running along a breakwater running far out into the harbor. It drew the boys further and further out, turning and tumbling them. Mycroft wrapped himself around his brother, shielding him from the massive granite blocks of the breakwater as best he could. In the process he took a solid bash on the head. He managed to maintain consciousness until they were drawn past the artificial stone reef, but then he let Sherlock go, shouting “Float, you moron,” as he released him, fearing to drag his brother down as he drowned.

Which was what he fully expected would happen next. His mind sorted it out quite neatly, even under the circumstances. Sherlock would, ideally, use such scant brain capacity as he’d been blessed with, and for the love of God float and kick, now that they were out of the waves and current and away from the rocks. The lifeguard would be able to make her way out to the buoyant little brat easily enough. And Mycroft could, finally, stop fighting to remain conscious and afloat, and just let go. No doubt they’d do what they could to recover him once they got Sherlock to shore, but the harbor was deep and the currents swift…

It never occurred to him that Sherlock, safely bobbing on top of the waves now that he was free of breakers and currents, would refuse to be rescued until Mycroft was. Nor had it occurred to him the lifeguard would cooperate. Mycroft conceded he was rather high on his own priority list, but didn’t expect to be high on anyone else’s…and he tended to take Sherlock’s oft-screamed “I hate you, Mikey!” as simple truth.

When he came to on the pebbly beach he was coughing up sea water, had two cracked ribs, a series of nasty scrapes and bruises, and a chipped elbow from being rammed against the breakwater, and was bleeding from a nasty scalp wound from the same source—and could see currents moving through the world like streams of mist.

“What are the odds on that one, Padre?” he asked the vicar when Mycroft got back to the estate later that month, at holiday’s end.

The vicar had been tutoring him for years, attempting to reproduce, at Mycroft’s parents' request, a modernized version of the classic education of a landed gentleman of the 1800s preparing for Oxbridge. The poor man could barely keep up with Sherlock, and had recently taken to simply pointing Mycroft at a subject and leaping deftly out of the way rather than get trapped between the predator and his natural prey. Blocking Mycroft’s path toward a linguistic challenge, for example, “is more than my life is worth,” he’d assured his wife one evening over white wine and Monty Python. There were, however, still things he knew that Mycroft didn’t.

“The odds on that are a bit difficult to reckon,” he assured his student. “Statistically speaking the odds of either are imposing. Let’s see, I jotted it down just this morning knowing you were coming…1 to 2,587.0 against for being a Seer, and 1 to 6,921.98 for being a Prophet. It’s complicated by the fact, though, that certain lines of either appear to have a slight affinity for becoming both, skewing the odds more than a little. And those who are both have an increased incidence of Proclamation and Judgement… You might wish to avoid being coshed on the head or coming down with a billy-o of a fever if you don’t want still more senses muddling up your perception.”

Mycroft cocked his head, considering. “Does it run in families?” he asked, pensively.

The vicar gave him a reproving glance. “No plotting to bash Sherlock’s brains in, hoping to get a partner in vision, you scamp. Really, he’s quite clever enough without visions and apparitions helping him along.”

Mycroft gave a dimpled smile. “Ah, but he’s so much better at cricket when he doesn’t have all this mess of wings and haloes and mists mucking up his view,” he pointed out. “It would even up the relationship.”

The vicar clucked, but not too hard. In truth, he appreciated the faint taste for whimsy and the fantastic that moderated what he felt was otherwise too somber a pilgrim spirit in Mycroft. The vicar understood with deep sympathy that being stricken with visions of halos and wings and such at a young age must make it difficult not to lean toward a sober and almost mystical view of such things as virtue and duty, but Mycroft was too young to behave like the Archbishop of Canterbury. That trace of humor lightened the poor boy.

“Perhaps one slight bash upside the head,” he said. “Done carefully, mind you. I’d consider that acceptable combined with a particularly sober attitude toward the confession of sin during service the next Sunday.”

Mycroft grinned at him, but sighed. “No. Probably not right, no matter how tempting. Now if whacking him over the head would magically grant me the ability to turn it on and off at will, that would be another matter. For that I’d gladly crack him a good one. You’ve no idea how much more difficult it is to function with second sight. I keep dodging things that aren’t there and ducking under incoming flights of cherubim and squinting to try to cut the glare of halos, which are always far too bright.” He pouted, planting his chin on the heel of his hand.

The vicar hummed, then, and went all absent-minded and spent the next two weeks rifling his library, the town library, and the church library. He took a run up to the cathedral close two towns over and ransacked their libraries before pinning a resident scholar in the refectory at lunch time and brainstorming with her. Four weeks after that, though, he went marching up to the dower house triumphant, a box of dusty old books in his hands.

“I thought I remembered something,” he said, smugly, as he hauled volumes out onto the dining table. “I can’t promise this will do you any good, Mycroft, but it was apparently the go-to wisdom back when people thought your talents were God’s Touch in the world. Training manuals for becoming a church Seer or Prophet or any of the other talents.”

He then jumped nimbly back and wiped his forehead as Mycroft attacked the books with the fury of a ravening tiger and the fixed focus of an abstinent saint at prayer.

“He really is quite the young man,” he told Mycroft’s parents in mixed admiration and dismay. “I must say, if he were a mousetrap your home would be briefly overwhelmed by the flood of rodents attracted by his allure—and from that time on the world would be as free of mice as Ireland is supposedly free of snakes. Damnably efficient, that boy. Thorough….”

Two weeks later he was brought out to inspect Sherlock, who sat at the dining room table with a bloody bandage on his head, two black eyes, a broken nose, and a look of preening victory.

“What are the odds on _me?_ ” he asked the vicar, gleefully. “Bet they’re infinite. Bet it’s 1 to a zillion!”

The vicar looked morosely at the boy. “Oh, Sherlock. What _have_ you done?”

“Ran his bicycle into the garden wall at about forty kilometers per hour,” Father Holmes said with a sigh.

“Near killed himself,” Mummy clucked, fretting and trying to get a sticking plaster on a slight cut over Sherlock’s eyebrow.

“Been an utter prat trying to get himself a talent,” Mycroft snapped, resentfully. “As if…”

“I did!” Sherlock snared. “Did, did, did, did! I can see keys and clues!”

“Oh, Sherlock,” the vicar said, and sat heavily down in the arm chair at the head of the table. He buried his face in his hands. “Oh, you silly young trout.”

“Clues,” Sherlock said more firmly. “Like white words floating in the air. And little signs and things—like icons from my Mac! They’re all over the place! It’s brilliant!”

Mycroft sat halfway down the table, and folded his hands primly in front of him. “He’s gone and made himself a Magpie, hasn’t he?”

“That he has,” the vicar moaned, without coming out from behind his hands. “Magpie, right and proper. You poor bastards.” He was so dismayed by Sherlock’s disaster he didn’t even think twice about his language. “You poor, poor bastards.”

Father Holmes cleared his throat. “What does it mean? A Magpie?”

“Means he’s got the same sight everyone else does, only with footnotes,” Mycroft snarled. “He’s wired his subconscious into his observational abilities, and it’s up and flagging everything he looks at with intuitive data. Which can be useful, but it usually doesn’t do a single thing for his social skills. Like he had many to begin with… At this point he’s perfectly likely to start telling Aunt Violet how much she weighs at Christmas.”

The family was silent for a second. Then Sherlock said, gleefully, “She put on two stone last year. No. Two stone-five pounds. And put on another two-pound-five-ounces while she was here. I estimate approximately one pound was stuffing and gravy, one pound plum pud with hard sauce, and the remainder—“

“We’re cancelling Christmas, dear,” Mummy said to Father, in a voice that brooked no argument. “Easter, too.”

“I think that’s quite wise,” Father said, with a sigh. “Can we at least still have the feast?”

“Feast is fine. But not a soul Sherlock can insult,” Mummy said.

Sherlock frowned. “Aren’t you excited?”

“Why should we be, you dim-bunny,” Mycroft snapped. “You didn’t give yourself a talent, you just gave yourself artificially induced Obsessive-Compulsive with an extra dose of bad manners.”

“It is a talent! It is!” Sherlock was furious. “I whacked my head good and proper and I got a talent like you! You’re just jealous!”

Mycroft sighed. “Whatever. I’m sure you’ll do something interesting with it,” he said…and went upstairs to start planning for early entrance into Cambridge. Life at the Dower House was about to become unbearable.

When he went he took all the vicar’s lovely books with him—except a single volume aimed at dealing with “the discipline of deduction through keys and clues.” He’d already memorized it, and thought it would be the one book of the lot to offer Sherlock any real help with his new “talent.”

His second year in Cambridge a lean gentleman with a jaunty air approached him. A week later he was in London for an interview “very much beneath the rose, as it were.”

Two weeks after that he was accepted into MI6 as a trainee and student-applicant.

It was the start of a beautiful future. What Mycroft remembered best about it, though, was the fine old gentleman who’d conducted the interview. He’d been a bit battle worn, and quite modest, with heavy glasses… and half-way through the interview he’d answered a phone. He’d said something, his eyes watching the swirling mists visible to both him and Mycroft.

When he hung up the phone, he waited…and seconds later the mists of probability _moved._

Mycroft gasped.

“You can see that, then, boy?” George Smiley said.

Mycroft nodded.

“Know what it means?”

“Means the future just changed.”

“That it does—though maybe not as I might wish. That remains to be seen. Would you like to be able to do that, boy?”

Mycroft nodded.

The old man’s wings—great crow’s wings, all glossy and iridescent—mantled, shadowing the table they shared. “We can teach you.”

Mycroft nodded, silently. Then he said, “You can see, too.”

“Just like you, and one more,” George Smiley said. “Seer. Prophet. Summoner. With luck you can be all three, too. The third one’s usually learned.”

“That’s nice,” Mycroft said, gazing at the swirling mists. Then he looked up at George Smiley, and said, shyly, “You’re the first other Seer I’ve met. I… can you tell me…”

“What I see when I see you?” Smiley grinned, understandingly. “It’s a bitch we can’t see our own aspects, isn’t it?”

Mycroft nodded, waiting.

Smiley leaned back in the chair, and _looked._

“Beautiful wings, like a house martin, shiny and sleek. With wings like those you could thread a needle’s eye in the Other Plane. And the mists rise off you like they rise off a lake at dawn.”

Mycroft swore that someday he’d learn to read the aspects and auras, and move the mists himself…and three decades later, he could. Three decades later he’d become the Master of MI6—and he influenced the world on three planes.

That was the year Mycroft was forced to take Sherlock in hand—and he met MI5’s top London field agent—a soot-grey gryphon in aspect, with starry peregrine’s wings.


	2. A Quick Comment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ok, given the positive feedback so far, I will keep playing with this. HOWEVER....
> 
> It's got elements I'm very tempted to incorporate into an original piece I've got started. I'm going to throw the Original stuff up over on the Original Works portion of the site. I'd really, really love readers to talk it over with. If I blend this and the original, the Mycroftian/Sherlockian elements would have to fade more than somewhat, but the material in the story would be added into the world structure I'm developing.
> 
> Anyway, the first stages of the original piece are here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1346578

See the comment above.

Again, original work is here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1346578

**Author's Note:**

> I have shifted Lestrade from being a golden gryphon to a soot grey gryphon, the better to play with the more crucial element of him being a London Peregrine gryphon. 
> 
> Peregrine falcons are among a rather small group of predators which have adapted reasonably well to urban life. They add enormous beauty to our cities, and help keep down the number of pigeons and other prey animals in urban environments. For a view of some London Peregrines, I point you [here](http://www.london-peregrine-partnership.org.uk/gallery.html?p=25#slideshow). You'll see the starry, spangled bellies of the birds, which I find especially appealing in the sooty grey as opposed to the more chestnut birds.


End file.
